Trump And Other Billionaires Who Scored As Stingiest Members Of Forbes 400

Room for improvement: A significant number of billionaires on our list have little to show when it comes to philanthropy.

How do the richest Americans do when it comes to giving away their money to charity? Let’s put it this way: Not every billionaire is eager to share their good fortune.

While many of the nation's wealthiest people are exceedingly generous -- by Forbes' calculations, 36 members of The Forbes 400 have given away at least $1 billion or more over their lifetimes -- there are a significant number of stingy billionaires who, to the best Forbes could find, have given away next to nothing in their lifetimes.

For the first time this year, we scored each member of The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans on how generous (or not) they are with their money. We found that a perhaps surprising number are tight-fisted, despite their financial wherewithal. Seventy-six billionaires (or nearly a fifth of our list members) earned the lowest-possible philanthropy score of one, which means they have given away less than $30 million or under 1% of their fortune in their lifetimes.

For some it is quite intentional. One plain-spoken billionaire is blunt about his disavowal of philanthropy. Ken Fisher, who founded Fisher Investments with $250 in 1979 and now manages some $96 billion in assets, says he is "not a fan of philanthropy." He's not terribly interested in volunteering his time, either, and has said that sitting on the board of a nonprofit would be "distracting." (Even still, Forbes found that he has made at least $11.5 million in donations over the years.)

Archie Aldis "Red" Emmerson, who made a fortune in timber and is the nation's third-largest landowner, has made similar comments. When his kids gave Oregon State University $6 million to build a forestry lab and name it in his honor, he quipped: "That'll take you all the way to the poor farm. Better not do it very often."

Another high-profile billionaire has been sued over his philanthropy. In 1987, President Donald Trump started the Donald J. Trump Foundation and indicated he would give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal. However, over the next 30 years, the foundation became a vehicle for self-promotion, in which he took donations from others and distributed the money as if it were his own. In June 2018, New York's attorney general filed a lawsuit against Trump, seeking $2.8 million plus penalties for allegedly using the foundation as a tool for his business and his 2016 presidential run. His lawyers responded by saying the suit is politically motivated.

Other times the nonprofits are the ones that want nothing to do with the billionaires. Former owner of the L.A. Clippers Donald Sterling has run into trouble with at least one institution that didn't want his money. In 2014, following the airing of racist remarks that were caught on tape, UCLA returned a $425,000 donation and rejected the remainder of a $3 million pledge that Sterling had made to support basic kidney research at the university. Not that he was all that generous anyway. Sterling started his foundation in 2006, the same year he was sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly refusing to rent to African-Americans, but had put just $4 million into the charitable vehicle as of the end of 2016. That amounts to just 0.001% of his estimated $3.6 billion fortune.

There are plenty more billionaires who simply do not appear to have made philanthropy a priority. Many of them either lack a foundation altogether or have started a foundation and not done much with it. Some have publicized a gift here or there, as evidence of their philanthropy, but the donations don't add up to much.

Take Stan Kroenke, a real estate and sports mogul who owns the L.A. Rams. He is the 58th richest person in the country but Forbes could only find traces of a single donation. In 2017, he and his wife Ann Walton Kroenke (a niece of Walmart founder Sam Walton) donated $1 million to the Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Rams have a foundation, in which they support local youth organizations, but it relies on donations from others. It's possible, however, that Kroenke prefers to give anonymously. His spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Andy Beal, a Texas banker with a fortune estimated at $9.9 billion, also doesn't appear to have given away much. He describes on his website a $1 million donation to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and "millions" more to colleges and charity sponsorships, as well as to prizes for science and math education. That is peanuts, relatively speaking, for a man who collected over $650 million in dividends from his banks just in 2017.

Sometimes the lack of giving is tied to the age of the billionaire or how recently they've made their fortunes. Some frankly are just getting started and can be expected to ramp up their philanthropy in coming years. For instance, Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, 35, took his cloud storage company public in March, then promptly donated $5 million to a new foundation. Snap cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel, 28, completed an IPO in 2017 and has also pledged to donate as many as 13 million Class A shares to a new foundation over the next two decades. So far, he has donated just shy of one million shares, worth roughly $10 million, according to regulatory filings. (Meanwhile, his cofounder Bobby Murphy, 30, has donated 3.3 million shares, equivalent to $54 million, and was thus given a higher philanthropy score.)

We acknowledge that some scores may be too low because we do not have a complete picture of a billionaire's charitable giving. While many people have long been public with their philanthropy or opted to share details of their giving with Forbes, there are others who have remained anonymous or declined to cooperate with us.

To come up with the philanthropy scores, a team of 32 Forbes journalists delved into public filings and reached out to 400 members and nonprofits in an effort to estimate lifetime giving. We also looked at what percent of their fortune they had given away. We weighted these two factors equally and scored people accordingly. Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving and how quickly their private foundations distributed dollars.

I am part of Forbes' wealth team, where I write about some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. I previously covered markets, investing and financial technology at Forbes. My reporting has taken me to the Seminole Tribe in Florida to sit down with the father of...